My Life Fighting Judicial Corruption and the Political Subversion of Freedom; keeping in mind Winston Churchill's words: ""All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope"

Tag Archives: Dinesh D’Souza

Do “Scary White People” in New Orleans support “the deification of Robert E. Lee” as part and parcel of “the false history of the Lost Cause?”

No? Well, I don’t think so either, but those were some of the more memorably idiotic lines uttered (the first by only one speaker that I heard, but the second two were repeated several times by different speakers) at the twin meetings on Confederate Monuments in New Orleans earlier today, Thursday, 13 August 2015 at City Hall, 1300 Perdido.

The whole day was frustrating and infuriating. I stayed for all of the first meeting but not the procedural votes afterwards, went over to Tulane to do some library work and returned in the evening for the second session.

I finally walked out after an hour and a half of the second meeting that started at 6:00 p.m. (New Orleans Human Relations Committee) when some hopelessly misguided and unintelligent white woman was explaining how she told her second grade son that Robert E. Lee was a traitor. The same woman had just said that she wouldn’t dream of buying a house on Jefferson Davis Parkway and that Lee’s statue had always made her uncomfortable since she moved to the City in 2001.

Many (mostly black) people said that they felt the same way around statues of Beauregard, Davis, and Lee that a Jew might feel around statues of Hitler, Himmler, or Goebbels. These and other statements of those in favor of the removal of the Confederate Heroes’ and Battle of Liberty Place Monuments were so completely asinine as to qualify most of the speakers for the booby hatch.

But what the day was really about was the despicable level of historical IGNORANCE and cultural PREJUDICE, coupled with Political Opportunism, of the American People, or at least those who showed up at City Hall in New Orleans today seeking removal of the monuments to the Old South’s greatest generals and leaders….

First prize for best speech among the “Pro Southern Heritage” side of the argument goes to a beautiful lady with a French Creole name—who claims a 300 year old family lineage going back to some of the greatest names in New Orleans and Louisiana history all the way back to before the founding of the city. This was exactly the kind of lady my Natchitoches-born grandmother had always hoped I would marry when I went to Tulane, but, alas, it didn’t happen, I went “Greek” instead). But this particular lady was full of fire and passion—and if she wants to run for Mayor I promise her 1000% support…

That was the short version of what I saw. What I felt was that a real race war, or at the very least a new and very hostile period between Stalinist mind control and historical manipulators and traditional Southerners.

The Stalinists were about 3/4 black and 1/4 white, while the traditionalists were overwhelmingly white with two or three reasonable black people daring to speak out.

I guess that “Stalinists” are predictably a nasty bunch, but these particular Stalinists were much more hateful than I expected—the lady “Latoya” who spoke about “Scary White People” was merely the most preposterous of them all. (The white people in presence were not scary at all—I wish they had shown a little more backbone—much too much apologizing and saying they hated the thought of offending anybody. If any word applies to the white crowd, it was “Scared.”

But Latoya was part of a “Take them all down” poster bearing click that was seated right behind me on the second row center behind the main public speaker’s podium, and they were vocally demonstrative and disruptive throughout, and I felt a great deal of hate from them and all who spoke against the moments.

I felt absolutely no hate among the white supporters of “maintaining the monuments,” just varying degrees of frustration for the most part, but I did feel a great fear on the part of the white people—fear of being called Racist or White Supremacist, fear of being called “traitors” perhaps.

Only one white person (and I can’t even say it was me), talked about the Stalinist mood of the event…..

As the evening ended, one bright clarion bell of hope sounded: Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has declared his opposition to taking down New Orleans’ Confederate Monuments—it would be strange indeed for Hindu-American ethnic Bobby Jindal to turn out to be the savior for the monuments repeatedly decried today as monuments to White Supremacy and White Racism….and to the suppression of all black and brown peoples….

So who knows? Maybe, just maybe, like Dinesh d’Souza, Indians have a better perspective on the cycles of caste, conquest, and colonialism even than do most Americans, black or white…. though that certainly would NOT explain the offensive behavior of Nikki Haley, the Governor of South Carolina, another Hindu-American…….

In the Wall Street Journal, and on other sites, it is apparent that Hawaii’s multi-racial paradise in the tropics, which gave us the multi-racial/mixed race Presidency of Barack Obama, suffers from festering racial wounds. Whether he was born in Mombasa, Kenya, as Lucas D. Smith has shown is most likely, or in Honolulu, as the so-called 44th President claims (even after his supposedly legitimate re-election would seem to moot the question forever except as a historical exercise), Barack Obama supposedly represents simultaneously the retreat of colonialism and the end of racism—at least of white racism. But anti-white racism seems to be allowed and actually encouraged.

Part of the purpose of my visit to Hawaii now in the late Autumn of 2012 is to educate myself about the tropical polyglot multi-racial society in Hawaii. I am told the Courts on this island are “conservative”, but by that I understand to mean that the children of Plantation workers favor the Corporate life and Corporate ownership of property against the individual…. i.e. “Conservatism” may mean something more like “Communism” here…. We shall see. But Hawaii is definitely the only place with more ostensible “racial diversity” than even Los Angeles, and the most governmental control over land use and distribution of any state in the Union….. We all do need to understand this….. what is the correlation between multi-racial society, corporate ownership, and communistic tendencies in government….. But in any case:

How terribly ironic that Hawaii, the only state of the United States ever to have had an established presence within the community of nations besides Texas, much more durable than the “Republic of West Florida” or even the easily remembered (because of the State Flag) “Bear Flag Republic of California”, has only garnered 4,150 signatures as of 11:27PM after my arrival at Kahului airport on Monday, November 26, 2012. Not only does Hawaii have a more active secessionist movement than any other state including Texas, but this movement was only just recently received attention, if not exactly “celebrated” in the popular media by a “not so favorable” mention in Dinesh D’Souza’s Obama 2016). Yet still, Hawaiians are not signing on at the White House Petition site: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/peacefully-grant-state-hawaii-withdraw-united-states-america-and-create-its-own-new-government/kfvFZyfw.

While secessionist fever has gathered over 117,000 signatures in my native Texas and over 37,000 in my grandmother’s native Louisiana, Hawaii has gathered separationist signatures on the level of Maine, Maryland, and Massachusetts—New Mexico with 5,155 and Nebraska with 7,284 have outbid Hawaii all together.

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:

Peacefully grant the State of Hawaii to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to dissolve political bands which have connected them, the separate and equal station to which Laws of Nature and God entitle them, respect requires they should declare the causes which impel them to separate.

Governments instituted derive their just powers from consent of the governed. Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to abolish and institute new Government.

Whereas, people of Hawaii recognize America guilty of unlawful occupation and request peaceful solution being of sound resonance to secede from said union of America, to build a government that better suits inhabitants of Hawaii with alliance to the United States of America.

Author Dinesh D’Souza told Newsmax TV in an exclusive interview on Friday that the documentary he co-directed – “2016: Obama’s America” – is even more relevant now in light of President Barack Obama’s re-election last week.

“This is the sort of relevance of ‘2016.’ The film, oddly enough, would be obsolete had Romney won, but is now very relevant that Obama’s there now,” D’Souza told Newsmax at Restoration Weekend 2012 in Palm Beach, Fla. “The film, in a way, looks at what would happen if Obama had his way.

“It’s almost as if we removed all obstacles, checks and balances, we removed the court, the Republican Congress. What if Obama could run unmolested? But, of course, he won’t. He’s going to have counterbalancing forces.

“On his own side in the Democratic Party, you have the mainstream Democrats and you have the left. Now, the left knows what Obama is doing. He is pursuing decline – and they want decline. This seems odd.

“I could go to a hundred American campuses and say: ‘America’s the rogue nation in the world. It’s America’s nuclear arsenal, not Iran’s that’s the problem. We should put the leash on America.’ And I’d get thunderous applause at Berkeley, Oberlin College, Yale.

“So there’s plenty of people on the left who have this sort of ‘let’s shrink America’ ideology,” D’Souza said.

Another scene from the documentary that D’Souza said is worth seeing how it plays out over the next four years is Obama’s conversation this past March in Seoul with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that was caught by an open microphone.

“One of the most chilling moments in ‘2016’ is when Obama leans over to the then-Russian President Medvedev and basically says: ‘Hey, let’s talk after the election. I’ve got some stuff I want to give you, but I can’t tell the American people now. So, let’s wait until I’m re-elected.’

“Then, after being re-elected, one of Obama’s first scheduled trips is to Russia. The topic: missile defenses.

“The risk with Obama is not that he has been slashing our offensive nuclear capability, but Obama seems to be willing to trade our missile defenses with Putin,” D’Souza said. “We’ll see what he actually does when he goes to Russia.”

And there’s also the president’s role in the rise of radical Islam in the Mideast.

“You see radical Islam is coming together, and Islam is being reconstituted as global power. Obama, far from trying to stop it, appears to be collaborating with it.”

But D’Souza complimented Obama’s early posture of bipartisanship in trying to avert the fiscal cliff at the end of the year.

“Tactically, it’s a smart move. It’s always a mistake to contrast ideology with pragmatism. Ideology is where you want to go – and pragmatism is how you get from here to there.

“Really effective ideologues are always pragmatic. They’ll always take 80 percent of what they want rather than try to get 100 percent and end up with nothing. In that sense, Reagan was a pragmatic ideologue.

“Obama, if he needs some Republican votes, as he clearly will, will try to get them – but he’ll want to move the debate in his direction. So that’s very different than Clinton compromise. Clinton compromise is: ‘I want to get a deal. And if I have to bend 50 percent and the other guys bend 50 percent, I’m okay with that because I want to be well-liked. And I’m perfectly happy to govern in the center.’

“Obama’s is: ‘I want to move the debate over here, and if I need to give a few inches to get there or get mostly there, I’ll do that,’ ” he added. “But that’s a different kind of approach. Contrasting Obama and Clinton is instructive.”

I watch very little television. I watch even less political television because TV if anything is entertainment, not a quiet forum or arena to think and reflect, nor even for meaningful discussion. The worst 3 minutes I saw on Political Television were the 3 minutes 39 seconds Gary Johnson got from Geraldo at Large on October 21. What a pathetic FARCE—the mainstream media managed to give a genuinely different candidate almost LESS THAN NOTHING—just enough time to emphasize how little importance they gave him. It was at that moment that I decided I had to support Gary Johnson for President—even if I hadn’t voted Libertarian in the last several elections.

I had very briefly considered a true “protest vote” for Roseanne Barr and Cindy Sheehan (more out of respect for Cindy Sheehan), but I decided I just didn’t like Cindy enough to make up for bearing the shameful stain, for the rest of my life, of having voted (even in protest) for Roseanne Barr….. So I voted for a fine, decent, constitutionally sound man who doesn’t have a chance in Hades of ever winning anything…. I confess that I also couldn’t bring my “right wing right hand” to fill in blanks for a party called “Peace and Freedom”—at least not in these United States with our dismal recent history of post-1984 constant Orwellian doublespeak…..

As I stated, I have already cast my ballot by mail and may or may not try to avail myself of the call in and reference privilege to see whether LA County counted it or not. I know that Gary Johnson will probably not in fact win even 1% of the popular vote nationwide and no Libertarian candidate has ever earned even a single “pledged” electoral vote, which means that the Libertarian parties lag behind not only the American Independents under George Corley Wallace and the States’ Rights Democrats under Strom Thurmond but also non-candidates such as Harry Flood Byrd (“Harry F. Byrd, Sr.”) who in 1960 received 14 unpledged electoral votes.

As for “faithless” electoral votes in 1968, Virginia Elector Roger McBride, pledged for Republicans Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, cast his electoral votes for Libertarian candidates John Hospers and Theodora Nathan. McBride’s vote for Nathan was the first electoral vote cast for a woman in U.S. history. Roger McBride became the Libertarian candidate for President in the 1976 election, on which occasion he received no electoral votes, although Ronald Reagan (not running in the general election) got one “faithless” electoral vote.

California has all but banned write-in candidates and so it is impossible to vote for really minor party candidates. I might have liked to have voted for Merlin Miller and Virginia Abernethy of the American Third Position Party, but it’s not an option. I hope that Californians will see the counterproductive tyrannical nature of “top two” candidates for federal legislative office (House and Senate) because this cuts out third parties and independent candidates all together. And just perpetuates the Democan and Republicrat content free monopoly on party politics, where there’s “not a dime’s worth of difference” between the major party nominees anymore….. George Wallace Democrats and John Ashbrook Republicans who were a vital part of the 1972 election 40 years ago are a thing of the past. There are now ONLY McGovern lefty Democrats and Rockefeller-Nixon left-wing Republicans, at least in the mainstream— There are not even any Goldwater Republicans aside from Ron Paul or really any moderate Democrats left in the arena.

So the thinking person hungers for the creation of an American Equivalent of the French Front National—a conservative party that offers a real difference to Mitt Romney wishy-washy Northeastern liberalism and Barack Obama’s hardcore socialism. The British BNP is (a) an electoral flop and a failure, (b) plagued by constant infighting in the tiny British conservative wing, and yet the BNP is more viable in the UK than either the Libertarian or the AP3 parties. Gary Johnson was a fine governor of New Mexico, but he has all the charisma of Ron Paul, which is why Ron Paul could never get on the Republican Party Ballot or steal an electoral vote even from a faithless elector. AP3 is ONLY on the ballot in 3 states (Colorado, Tennessee, and New Jersey—and after Sandy the turnout in New Jersey is probably going to be pretty damned weak).

In closing, I see that my former flame Orly Taitz has filed another set of electoral challenges right before the election in addition to her continually pointless comedy of errors to disqualify Obama. I wish to offer what I suspect will be the final word on Orly, or at least my final word on Orly: she is a total and complete, unmitigated, unredeemable fraud. Her crusade over the past four years has done NOTHING except to discredit all critics of Barack Obama’s constitutional eligibility. She has squeaked and squawked “louder and higher” than anybody else, but she has not learned from her mistakes or altered her strategy in the least. I accuse Orly Taitz of being just another tool for Obama’s campaign of deception and deceit. All “birthers” are stained by her disastrous, unprofessional litigation campaigns. All “conservatives” who question Barack Obama are lumped with Orly’s otherwise undistinguished platform of Empty Neo-Con Platitudes. There was a time, in 2009, when I believed that it was possible to use the litigation process to challenge Obama, but Orly blew every possible opportunity and her strategy was aimed to HER PUBLIC AUDIENCE, not the Courts, and she admitted as much to me in private.

All constitutional conservatives, all who believe as I do that Obama should never have been President, should shun Orly Taitz and let her sink silently into the rubbish heap of history. Her own campaigns for California Secretary of State and U.S. Senate were disgraceful self-funded plans of self-glorification with not one iota of sincere belief or genuine crusade…..

Merlin Miller is a film-maker, and I hope he will use his talents to develop an alternative media campaign and some documentaries which will advance the cause of true conservatism. I recommend documentaries on the decline and fall of the American Family with the help of American Family Courts, as well as on the mortgage crisis and the role of foreign investors and international bankers in all but obliterating true private home ownership as a realistic dream for most of the middle bourgeois and all of the working classes. I think we should have documentaries on how feminism has resulted in increased numbers of women opting for prostitution and the various “sex-trade” businesses, for the simple reason that the modern norm of state-licensed marriage is hardly distinguishable (either morally or economically) from late 19th century licensed prostitution.

This year, the “Moonrise Kingdom” reminded us of how beautiful and innocent life in the antique (1965) homogeneous middle class society could be, even through the tempestuous early teen years of adolescence, even in the face of bureaucratic obstinancy and legal stupidity. The movie “Hunger Games” showed us the bleak future of an America governed by an “Obamanation”-type plutocratic socialist elite which squeezes every last drop of blood out of the strongest and most worthy of the ordinary, common people. The movie “Batman: Dark Knight Rises” served as a cover for the worst of the tendencies in our nation precisely TOWARDS the plutocratic socialist oligarchy of the “Hunger Games” and was simultaneously used as a screen of a completely different kind in Aurora, Colorado, to promote the step-by-step obliteration of liberty and any semblance of justice and constitutional due process of law in these United States of America. “Batman”, in short, became emblematic for our descent into darkness, not our rise from it.

I predict Obama will win the election and that all the worst fears expressed by Dinesh D’Souza in “Obama 2016” will fade and look pale in comparison with reality. If Mitt Romney wins, I will smile, very briefly, just to think that I can actually look at a picture of the de facto but Anti-Constitutional President without ralphing. I think Romney is probably technically qualified to be President in the ways that Obama was not, but in all probability we’ll have Four More Years (some say eight) of Kenyan Dictatorship in store for us….

Three weeks ago, on September 29, 2012, I attended a lecture by Mark Weber at the Institute for Historical Review headquartered in Newport Beach, Orange County, California. It was a major eye-opener for me, and I would encourage anyone and everyone interested in international politics to listen to what Mark Weber had to say:http://www.ihr.org/audio/MWIran092912.mp3.

As a matter of fact, as I told Mark Weber after his speech, I think this presentation should be required listening in every college, high school, and army and navy recruitment center in the USA…..especially the latter.

Weber’s address focused on the questions of whether Iran poses a threat of nuclear or convention aggression in the West Asian arena, whether Iran has or plans to acquire or develop nuclear weapons, and whether the Israeli Prime Minister’s recent “saber rattling” against Iran rests on any rational basis.

Weber answered summarily and categorically “no” to each of these questions, and as background discussed his recent visit to Tehran to speak at the conference held in conjunction with the First Independent International Filmmakers Festival “New Horizon” sponsored by: http://indfilmfest.com/ujcke3, held from September 1-September 6 of this year.

Apparently very few Americans were in attendance, owing doubtless to Iran’s reputation in this country as part of what our penultimate President W. Bush called “Axis of Evil” along with current member North Korea and (former?) member Libya.

Weber’s portrayal of Iran was certainly not of an evil nation or of a people anxious for war or “jihad” against the West, but Iran has had the dubious distinction of straddling all world conflicts as the largest truly “non-aligned” nation in Asia, throughout the 20th and now 21st centuries. Iran stayed out of World Wars I and was only drawn into World War II, “kicking and screaming” by a joint British-Soviet invasion to secure the oilfields of the country, and Iran declared war on Germany in 1943 and thus became eligible for membership in the newly envisioned but then only just barely nascent United Nations.

What happened after World War II in Iran was one of the least known but most decisive events in shaping the Cold-War and Post-Cold War environments in Europe.

To wit, in 1951, a Democratic-Social reformer Prime Minister of Iran Mohammed Mosaddeq (also “Massaddegh”), appointed by the Shah, persuaded the Iranian parliament to nationalize the British-owned oil industry, in what became known in the international press as the Abadan Crisis.

The Shah owed his crown to British power and his wealth to British Oil, but he did little or nothing to stop or restrain Mossaddegh. Despite British pressure, including an economic blockade, the nationalization and seizure of all British Oil Interests continued. Mossadegh (the 60th Prime Minister of Iran) left office briefly 1952 but was quickly re-appointed by the shah as the 62nd prime minister, due to a popular uprising in Mossadegh’s support. The Shah himself went briefly into exile in August 1953 after a failed military coup by Imperial Guard Colonel Nematollah Nassiri.

Then on August 19, 1953, a successful coup was organized by the American (CIA) with the active support of the British (MI6) (known as Operation Ajax). The nominal leader of this coup was headed by a retired army general Fazlollah Zahedi. The coup included a propaganda campaign of disinformation and outright lies designed to turn the population against Mossaddegh, finally forced Mossaddegh from office.

These events of sixty years ago have lingered bitterly in the memory of Iranians of all classes until the present time. Mossadegh was arrested and tried for treason. Found guilty, his sentence reduced to house arrest on his family estate while his foreign minister, Hossein Fatemi, was executed. Zahedi succeeded him as prime minister. The new British and American supported regime suppressed all opposition to the Shah, specifically the National Front and Communist Tudeh Party.

Last year on this blog I described Josh Tickell’s movie “The Big Fix” as the best documentary ever produced in the United States. It covered the history of Mossadegh’s deposition by the British oil interests as one of the key starting points for understanding British Petroleum’s complete indifference to democracy and human life seen throughout the 2010 “Deep Horizon” Oil spill and its aftermath off the coast of Louisiana.

Earlier this year, other pundits proclaimed Dinesh D’Souza’s “Obama 2016″ as the greatest documentary of all time, but D’Souza would clearly NOT have felt at home at the International Filmmaker’s conference in Tehran because of his vociferous support of Israel, and his criticism of Obama for taking a “soft” stance against Iran and the “threat” it poses.

All this brings up a very interesting point, ONLY radicals (of both the right and left) ever have anything good to say about Iran and/or anything bad to say about Israel. Dinesh D’Souza singled out Dr. Edward Said (Ph.D. 1964, Harvard GSAS) as one of Obama’s personal “Founding Fathers.” Ironically enough Said was a nearly exact contemporary and sometime classmate (in English Literature) together with my late father. According to Dinesh D’Souza, Said influenced Obama against Israel and shaped his thinking about the Post-Colonial World.

Again, readers of this Blog know that I despise Barack Hussein Obama with the bloodiest of purple passions, but I cannot say a single bad thing about Edward Said, no do I think that Said was a socialist or anti-American in any of the ways Obama quite clearly is. Indeed, it is somewhat ironic to me that Dinesh D’Souza would attack Said, since they are both Christians born in populations which are overwhelmingly “something else”).

Quite aside from the fact that my father had known him in graduate school, and always spoke highly of him, I attended at least two dozen lectures by Said over the course of about 30 years from New Orleans 70118 to Cambridge 02138 and from New Haven 06511 to Chicago 60637. I was never once less than overwhelmed by his erudition and articulate presentation of the relationship between the Arab-Islamic and Anglo-Christian worlds. Said was born Jerusalem to Palestinian Christian parents (his mother hailed from Jesus’ town of Nazareth), and Said advocated justice for the non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs, both Christian and Muslim.

Whether D’Souza has justly grouped Said with Obama or not, the perception of most “mainstream” conservatives (and centrist liberals) in the United States is that only radicals of the left or right could possibly say anything bad about Israel or anything good about Iran. Despite admiring Edward Said almost as much as D’Souza claims Obama does, I am generally of a radical right-wing persuasion, if any at all.

Among the radical rightists who have supported Iran are David Duke of Louisiana, whose commentaries on the (in many ways inspiring, and technically irreproachable) movieThe 300 (about the Spartan resistance at Thermopylae—a name which means “Hot Springs” in Greek) show how certain pro-Israeli propagandists were preparing to turn the American population against Iran by massive disinformation equivalent to the old American & British Campaigns against Mossaddegh. See especially: http://www.davidduke.com/?p=2381 “The Movie 300: Neocon Racial Propaganda for War.”

Now I cannot sympathize in the least with David Duke’s obsessive antisemitism, but (again ironically), Duke in all his commentaries on Iran directly echoes Edward Said in his judgment that American perceptions of Iran rest on media disinformation and politically motivated mischaracterizations intended to dehumanize the people of Iran.

I am probably the only person on planet earth to see a major analytical parallel between David Duke’s racial politics and Edward Said’s post-Colonial, post-modern deconstruction of American popular culture perceptions of Iran. But my analysis fits in with the routine conundrum it is to say that ONLY the radical left-and-right wingers oppose Israel.

The late William F. Buckley once (back in the 1970s I think, during or shortly after the Henry Kissinger era) satirically commented that so central was Israel to American National Defense Policy that it would make sense to admit Israel as the 51st state of the Union. Buckley noted in support of this proposal that the 4500 air miles from Washington D.C. to Honolulu are only approximately 1000 miles less than the distance from Washington to Tel Aviv…. and that Guam remains a recognized U.S. Territory at 9,000 miles from Washington….

Mark Weber highlighted, as has Representative Ron Paul, that Israel remains to this day the center of U.S. Foreign Policy—more critical in so many ways than the U.K., Germany, or Japan—

Men of my father’s and grandfather’s generation read the poetry of the East as part of a “Gentleman’s education” (only partly as Colonialists in Said’s interpretation, but also as men seeking deeper understanding of the wisdom of the world, especially in conjunction with the mysticism of their beloved Scottish Rite Freemasonry.

As Mark Weber emphasized, most modern American perceptions divorce the people of Iran from their deep historical traditions of literate civilization, which has produced some of the most distinctive poetry and philosophy of both the pre-Islamic (e.g. Zoroastrian Zend-Avesta) and Islamic (e.g. Ferdowsi’s “Book of Kings” or Shahnama followed by the Sufi [“Sophy”] poets Rumi [The Masnavi and Divan-e Shams], Sadi, Hafiz Shirazi, and Al-Ghazali [e.g. “Alchemy of Happiness”] not to mention Scheherazade’s Thousand and one Nights which I, like countless generations of schoolboys before me, grew up reading in awe and fascination of the “mysterious orient”).

The concept of “mysterious east, land of snake charmers and flying carpets” got at least passing message in Ben Affleck’s new movie Argo which I finally got to see last night (October 19)—delayed by my going on two weeks in Fresno—but Peyton and I finally discovered that they DO have cinemas here…. and we desperately needed a break from the Medical Marijuana/Federal vs. State power constitutional controversies we’ve been working on.

Argo is an excellent movie, whether you remember just how ashamed you were to be traveling abroad during America’s most disgraceful 444 days in history from November 4 1979-January 20 1981, or whether you’re of the modern (born, like my own son Charlie, in 1992 or after) generation for whom even the name of President Jimmy Carter conjures up nothing more than a little bit of a vague and fuzzy memory that he might or might not have been the first peanut farming Navy Officer from Georgia ever to become President…. and the first (and last) U.S. President to be born in the DEEP South (which does not include Texas) since before the War Between the States of 1861-65.

I remember the Iranian Revolution distinctly and I remember thinking it was a very bad thing. The Shah had favored the modernization and Westernization of Iran—women could wear dresses without veils and things like that.

The outrages of the Oil-Based Political Economy became intolerable in 1973—but not only did the American people accept that status quo without revolution, they did not seek to punish the oil companies for their price-gouging and irrational profiteering and the wild fluctuations in the price of oil (with a steady and inexorable upward trend) that has become a permanent feature of our lives…..

In any event, Argo did not “trash” the Islamic Revolutionary Iranians but it portrayed them very much as I remember them from the “mainstream media” in 1979-1981. They were definitely America’s enemies. At Chichén Itzá on my archaeological project, one of my student assistants Rafael “Rach” Cobos Palma used to go around with a towel on his head (before “towel-head” was considered a politically incorrect racist epithet) chanting “Death to America” and periodically trying to rattle me by reporting fictitious news items that the price of oil had doubled or tripled and the dollar had accordingly collapsed…. He thought this was the funniest thing on earth since back in those days I was working in Mexico on that extremely advantageous dollar-to-peso exchange rate that prevailed throughout the 1980s.

Argo was basically historically truthful in all details, so far as I can tell anyhow. The cast and script were both beyond reproach, from Affleck’s heroic role as Anthony Mendez to John Goodman’s predictably brilliant and humorous performance as John Chambers [Clea Helen D’etienne DuVall has certainly had a fascinating career since she played Marcie Ross the invisible girl in the First Season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—Episode 11 “Out of Mind, Out of Sight”.]

In any event—Argo reminded me of the first time I bitterly reflected on Iran as a true humiliation to the United States. We (our UK and US governments and the American and British oil cartels whcih control our governments) created the Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi as an absolute monarch. He had started out, during his early post-war years as a young King, apparently in favor of Mossaddegh and Constitutional Democracy) and supported him blindly, ignoring the unhappiness of the vast majority of the people of Iran.

Reza Pahlevi ended his life and career envisioned by many of his people as a blood-sucking vampire. But the US supported the Shah and, as Argo clearly showed, our intelligence did not anticipate, perceive, or recognize any threat to his rule as late as a month before he fell in 1978. Our country was then humiliated by the Revolutionary Guard of the nascent Islamic Republic over and over again, not least when Ross Perot sent in a private paramilitary team which literally crashed and burned….

When I first heard that Ronald Reagan might have authorized or encouraged Oliver North to purchase Iranian weapons for the Contras of Iran, my first reaction was that Reagan was aiding and abetting the enemies of the United States and should be impeached for treason—and how could Reagan have done it when he knew all about the hostage crisis and how the Iranians had made us look like mental and moral midgets….McDonald’s munching morons whose only values were comfort and pleasure obtainable with the least possible effort….in thought or work.

Mark Weber’s perspective on Ahmadinejad marks the most major, thoughtful counterposition to the mainstream media views, which were (to the extent they were reasonable) formed and shaped by the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the Hostage Crisis, in which the Iranian actors played the parts of the most-grotesquely brutal haters of America. As bad as the American role in the Shah’s rise and evolution as a tyrant may have been, there was not a single member of the embassy staff who could possibly have been held responsible. The Iranians, as shown in Argo were just formulaically bullying their prize captive Americans as spies….and threatening them all with kangaroo trials and public executions…..

So Iran has suffered from its status as a Non-Aligned nation with significant oil wealth—it was reduced to a quasi-Colonial status right at the end of the Colonial Period, in the early 1950s—and was the first example of a nation colonized primarily for Oil—Oil at any cost, oil above all other human values.

Mark Weber of the Institute of Historical Review gave a wonderful presentation—he is mostly conceived as a right-winger, although a much more academically respectable right-winger than “Dr.” David Duke with his degree from a rather obscure “Management” school (MAUP) in the Ukraine…

Equally respectable and more directly politically active than Duke, currently, with less seemingly preposterous baggage, was another American in attendance at the New Horizon Independent Film-Fest in Tehran, Merlin Miller. Merlin Miller is the Presidential candidate of the newly formed American Third Position “AP3” Party, which just came into existence in or about January 2010, formed and chaired by William D. Johnson, a Nippono-philic Los Angeles lawyer currently running for Congress in Michigan’s “open” 11th Congressional District. Merlin Miller has apparently only achieved ballot access in 3 states for the November election and California is not one of them.

What does it say about the United States that the only Americans of any note willing to attend a film festival in Iran are two solid right-wingers (Weber & Miller) and apparently several black film-makers and artists from the extreme left of Detroit and Miami? Apparently, “core” Hollywood and Beverly Hills media figures were all but totally absent and unrepresented.

And at this conference in Tehran, I get the impression that very little was said about the American popular conception of Iran—even a relatively positive perspective as formed in Josh Tickell’s 2011 The Big Fix, the mostly neutral but historically accurate portrayal in 2012’sArgo or the negative (but not particularly highlighted) view of Iran suggested in D’Souza’s Obama 2016.

Cultural exchange combined with political dialogue would, in my opinion, produce positive results between Iran and the US—and the American People MUST somehow become educated. Mark Weber reports and I have independently confirmed that certain polls have shown that 71% of the U.S. population believe that Iran now possesses Nuclear Weapons.

After the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lies that roped us into Iraq—into COLONIZING Iraq—the American public DESERVE to hear Mark Weber and Merlin Miller speaking out about their recent first hand experience with the Iranian people and in particular with President Ahmadinejad.

Well, OK, I just saw Dinesh D’Souza’s “2016 Obama’s America“. It’s an absolute “must see” before the election because it imparts vital evidence concerning our 44th President and an interpretation of his policies which everyone should consider.

Now Dinesh D’Souza is a young man (one year younger than I am in fact, so he’s really young, just like Obama….) so he may not suffer from this problem but he kind of reminds me of some of the legendary professors I’ve heard of (but never experienced in person) who actually fall asleep during their OWN lectures…

So far as story telling goes, for narrative quality and dramatic effect, it is really fairly dismal, especially when compared with “The Big Fix“—last year’s astounding movie about the BP Oil Spill and it’s impact on New Orleans and Louisiana generally. Dinesh is an Ivy League academic from India and he SHOULD have hired Josh & Rebecca Tickell or someone to bring life to what, honestly, SHOULD have been a very compelling story and COULD have been presented better.

His RebusDictis (these things having been said)—I highly recommend the movie for its informational content (just don’t expect to be entertained or to enjoy the experience even a little bit—if you’re tired, have a coffee or two before hand—because you NEED TO HEAR THIS STORY).

To make a long story short—Dinesh D’Souza presents Obama as the ultimate con-man and traitor, the last person ON EARTH who ever should have been President of the United States (though the narrative never actually says this in so many, or so few, words). To use one of my old Tulane University college archaeology advisor’s favorite phrases, this movie clearly portrays Barack Hussein Obama as a Classic “Nigger in the Woodpile” The_Nigger_in_the_Woodpile.jpg 760×524 pixels. The phrase means (according to Wikipedia, and Will*), “some fact of considerable importance that is not disclosed – something suspicious or wrong“: Especially a stowaway or “sleeper agent” type spy — in short, a bunch of Greek Soldiers hidden inside, say, a wooden Horse mistaken by the apparently “Born Yesterday” Trojans as a Gift from the Gods (I have always wondered how the Trojans could possibly have been this dumb? Had ten years of siege weakened their intelligence through malnutrition and lack of exercise? Why didn’t anyone (besides Cassandra) ask: WHY would the Gods make such a strange gift? The Gods gave the people sun and water and grain and cattle, which are all very useful, but what can you DO with a wooden horse that big, exactly, I wonder, that would make it an appropriate gift from the Gods as opposed to a trick by the “Wily Odysseus”).

Anyhow, Obama entered the Presidency as a Communist Nigger in the Woodpile OR as a Communist Trojan Horse—take your pick, but Obama became President, according to D’Souza, and I have to agree, for the SOLE purpose of destroying America’s (1) economic, (2) military, (3) political, (4) intellectual, and (5) moral strength. This is no modest undertaking, not an inconsiderable set of goals, but look how well Obama has done in just his first term!!!! That is the long and short of Dinesh D’Souza’s movie. Except to point out: Obama has done so much to destroy America in ONE term, he’ll probably transform us into a lower-ranking Third World Country somewhere beneath Belize and Burkina Fasso but above Bangladesh and Haiti if elected to a second term.

According to D’Souza, Obama WANTS to do this because he is fulfilling his father’s dream of destroying the most successful product of the White Anglo-Saxon Race and Nation of England (that most successful product being the USA) because England had intentionally (in the Obamas’ opinions, both junior and senior) conquered, colonized and underdeveloped Kenya in particular and 1/4 of the African continent in general.

Empires are majestic and romantic, but they are inevitably built on conquest and cruelty, whether we’re talking about Xerxes (“Ahasueras”), Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and all the Roman Emperors (“Caesars”) who followed him, at least up through Marcus Aurelius but probably straight through to 1453 and the Fall of Constantinople, the Sassanian Empire, Mongol Empire, Charlemagne’s Empire, the Caliphates of Baghdad and Cordova, the Ottoman Empire, the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, the Spanish Empire, or the British Empire. Charlemagne’s Empire and the British empire were possibly the “Kindest and Gentlest” of this list, but it is simply not in human nature for local groups and societies to give up their freedom and autonomy voluntarily, and so “to make an Imperial omelette, you have to break quite a few local small-to-medium size eggs, and a few really big eggs” sometimes, like the Aztec and Inca Empires being incorporated into the Spanish Empire, or the Mogul Empire being incorporated into the British.

I grew up with a very mixed up perspective on Empire. On the one hand, everyone in my family agreed that the British Empire and the Pax Britannica were great things, but also that the British were almost congenitally stupid in their handling of their imperial possessions, starting with the USA. It would have been so easy, and so completely reasonable, to give three million American “colonists” direct representation “across the water” in the Parliament of the United Kingdom in London. Why, oh, WHY did the British Parliament and crown not extend ALL the rights of Englishmen to ALL the King’s subjects in North America? And by the time they got to India, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, the British had (apparently) learned almost nothing from their experience in America. TO THIS DAY I look at Canada, the most loyal of all the British Dominions, and think that Britain and Canada should share a single parliament—especially in this day and age of jet travel, telephones, faxes, and e-mail.

The ROMAN Empire was always extending full citizenship to the conquered peoples—as was Napoleon’s “New” (if short lived) Franco-Roman Empire of 1803-1814. Now, admittedly, the Romans did not go around extending citizenship owing to any romantic precursor philosophy ancestral or antecedent to the French “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité“, but because, face it, mere conquest is NEVER enough for the conqueror; a real conqueror wants to keep gouging the conquered people for taxes so long as his empire endures…. and you can ONLY Tax Citizens (or in Rome, you could only tax citizens).

But Britain never learned from its mistakes and never extended any sort of rights to the colonial peoples except to self-government UNTIL THEY ABOLISHED THE EMPIRE—and then, by the British Nationality Act of 1948 they basically admitted that all their former and soon-to-be former “Colonials” were going to be British—and thus they set up the uncontrolled colonization of Britain by former colonials. Truly, there must be a defect in our Anglo-Saxon genes when it comes to conquest and colonialism, because the British, really and truly, honestly and sincerely, never got ANYTHING right at the right time, not even once.

But anyhow, Dinesh D’Souza basically presents the hypothesis that the British conquest and colonization of Kenya was something that Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., really resented, and Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., has sought to use the Presidency of the United States to wreak vengeance on the Anglo-Saxon peoples of the world for his father’s sake. This is kind of a “reverse Oedipus-syndrome”, I guess, where Obama is symbolically killing his mother (by killing and impoverishing “her race, her people”) for his dead and always absent Father’s sake. Except of course, that Obama’s mother was one of those early 1950s and 1960s communist traitors herself, from a family and long line of communist traitors, who already WANTED to wipe out her own culture and civilization (and apparently divorced her second husband Lolo Soetoro because he DIDN’T).

I have no idea how real American conservatives can look at the history of Stanley Ann Dunham and the Obama family and NOT be totally in favor of abortion. Not just wishy-washy “abortion on demand” but mandatory, Chinese-style forced abortion for any father who already has at least two children…..as Obama’s father did back home with an (unfortunately undisclosed) first wife. In every sense Obama is the product of the Brave New World and the more I learn about h Barack’s mother the more I think Montana Judge Richard Cebull of the United States District Court for the District of Montana (born 1944) has been the victim of a real “politically correct” hatchet job….**

In any event, one of the most interesting moment’s in D’Souza’s movie is when Barack Obama’s brother, who lives in a slum dwelling in Nairobi, comments that Barack and his (own) father were both wrong: the British were GOOD for Kenya and should have stayed until Kenya was actually ready for Independence.

Any way you look at it, whether it’s a good movie or not, and as movies go, it’s really not, Dinesh D’Souza makes some really interesting points. I’m not at all sure that his pseudo-Freudian psychoanalysis of Obama is correct, because, basically, Obama was raised by his white mother and SHE was a communist, Obama’s white GRANDPARENTS were communists, and they (the Dunham family) apparently associated primarily with black communists.

It is beyond incredible that anyone like Barack Hussein Obama ever became President of the United States. It is a tragedy of almost unparalleled proportions. I personally wish we had been conquered by the Soviet Russians during the Cold War instead of betrayed by our own mind-dead, media manipulated electorate into electing this Trojan Horse for President—it would have been a MUCH more honest and sincere way to introduce communism to North America.

** Cebull “reported himself for judicial misconduct” to the Ninth Circuit under extreme pressure to resign after he circulated an e-mail about Obama’s birth: “A little boy said to his mother; ‘Mommy, how come I’m black and you’re white?’ His mother replied, ‘Don’t even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you’re lucky you don’t bark!‘” I rarely endorse a vulgar joke, but I would tend to nominate Cebull to the next vacancy on the Supreme Court, myself…. I would simply add to the joke, after the word “bark”, the words “in Russian or Chinese”, because all evidence is that Obama’s mother and all of what Dinesh D’Souza calls Obama’s “founding fathers” were all the reddest of the red in the USA…. candidates for the firing squad after trial and conviction for treason, every one of them.